Back to our earlier example, if a bot doesn’t know the word trousers and a user corrects the input to pants, the bot will remember the connection between those two words in the future. The more words and connections that a bot is exposed to, the smarter it gets. This process is similar to that of human learning. Our capacity for memory and synthesis is part of what makes us unique, and we’re teaching our best tricks to bots.
This is where most applications of NLP struggle, and not just chatbots. Any system or application that relies upon a machine’s ability to parse human speech is likely to struggle with the complexities inherent in elements of speech such as metaphors and similes. Despite these considerable limitations, chatbots are becoming increasingly sophisticated, responsive, and more “natural.”
IBM estimates that 265 billion customer support tickets and calls are made globally every year, resulting in $1.3 trillion in customer service costs. IBM also referenced a Chatbots Magazine figure purporting that implementing customer service AI solutions, such as chatbots, into service workflows can reduce a business’ spend on customer service by 30 percent.
2a : a computer program that performs automatic repetitive tasks : agent sense 5 Several shopping "bots" will track down prices for on-line merchandise from a variety of vendors.— Sam Vincent Meddis especially : one designed to perform a malicious action These bot programs churn away all day and night, prodding at millions of random IP addresses looking for holes to crawl through. — Jennifer Tanaka
In our work at ZipfWorks building and scaling intelligent shopping platforms and applications, we pay close attention to emerging trends impacting digital commerce such as chatbots and mobile commerce. As this nascent trend towards a more conversational commerce ecosystem unfolds at a dizzying pace, we felt it would be useful to take a step back and look at the major initiatives and forces shaping this trend and compiled them here in this report. We’ve applied some of these concepts in our current project Dealspotr, to help more shoppers save more money through intelligent use of technology and social product design.
Lack contextual awareness. Not everyone has all of the data that Google has – but chatbots today lack the awareness that we expect them to have. We assume that chatbot technology will know our IP address, browsing history, previous purchases, but that is just not the case today. I would argue that many chatbots even lack basic connection to other data silos to improve their ability to answer questions.
Reduce costs: The potential to reduce costs is one of the clearest benefits of using a chatbot. A chatbot can provide a new first line of support, supplement support during peak periods or offer an additional support option. In all of these cases, employing a chatbot can help reduce the number of users who need to speak with a human. You can avoid scaling up your staff or offering human support around the clock.
Dialogflow is a very robust platform for developing chatbots. One of the strongest reasons of using Dialogflow is its powerful Natural Language Understanding (NLU). You can build highly interactive chatbot as NLP of Dialogflow excels in intent classification and entity detection. It also offers integration with many chat platforms like Google Assistant, Facebook Messenger, Telegram,…
If a text-sending algorithm can pass itself off as a human instead of a chatbot, its message would be more credible. Therefore, human-seeming chatbots with well-crafted online identities could start scattering fake news that seem plausible, for instance making false claims during a presidential election. With enough chatbots, it might be even possible to achieve artificial social proof.[58][59]
You may remember Facebook’s big chatbot push in 2016 – when they announced that they were opening up the Messenger platform to chatbots of all varieties. Every organization suddenly needed to get their hands on the technology. The idea of having conversational chatbot technology was enthralling, but behind all the glitz, glamour and tech sex appeal, was something a little bit less exciting. To quote Gizmodo writer, Darren Orf:

Three main reasons are often cited for this reluctance: the first is the human side—they think users will be reluctant to engage with a bot. The other two have more to do with bots’ expected performance: there is skepticism that bots will be able to appropriately incorporate history and context to create personalized experiences and believe they won’t be able to adequately understand human input.

Customer service departments in all industries are increasing their use of chatbots, and we will see usage rise even higher in the next year as companies continue to pilot or launch their own versions of the rule-based digital assistant. What are chatbots? Forrester defines them as autonomous applications that help users complete tasks through conversation. […]
User message. Once authenticated, the user sends a message to the bot. The bot reads the message and routes it to a natural language understanding service such as LUIS. This step gets the intents (what the user wants to do) and entities (what things the user is interested in). The bot then builds a query that it passes to a service that serves information, such as Azure Search for document retrieval, QnA Maker for FAQs, or a custom knowledge base. The bot uses these results to construct a response. To give the best result for a given query, the bot might make several back-and-forth calls to these remote services.

Unlike Tay, Xiaoice remembers little bits of conversation, like a breakup with a boyfriend, and will ask you how you're feeling about it. Now, millions of young teens are texting her every day to help cheer them up and unburden their feelings — and Xiaoice remembers just enough to help keep the conversation going. Young Chinese people are spending hours chatting with Xiaoice, even telling the bot "I love you".

aLVin is built on the foundation of Nuance’s Nina, the intelligent multichannel virtual assistant that leverages natural language understanding (NLU) and cognitive computing capabilities. aLVin interacts with brokers to better understand “intent” and deliver the right information 24/7; the chatbot was built with extensive knowledge of LV=Broker’s products, which accelerated the process of being able to answer more questions and direct brokers to the right products early on

There are different approaches and tools that you can use to develop a chatbot. Depending on the use case you want to address, some chatbot technologies are more appropriate than others. In order to achieve the desired results, the combination of different AI forms such as natural language processing, machine learning and semantic understanding may be the best option.
In 1950, Alan Turing's famous article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published, which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence. This criterion depends on the ability of a computer program to impersonate a human in a real-time written conversation with a human judge, sufficiently well that the judge is unable to distinguish reliably—on the basis of the conversational content alone—between the program and a real human. The notoriety of Turing's proposed test stimulated great interest in Joseph Weizenbaum's program ELIZA, published in 1966, which seemed to be able to fool users into believing that they were conversing with a real human. However Weizenbaum himself did not claim that ELIZA was genuinely intelligent, and the Introduction to his paper presented it more as a debunking exercise:
Bots are also used to buy up good seats for concerts, particularly by ticket brokers who resell the tickets.[12] Bots are employed against entertainment event-ticketing sites. The bots are used by ticket brokers to unfairly obtain the best seats for themselves while depriving the general public of also having a chance to obtain the good seats. The bot runs through the purchase process and obtains better seats by pulling as many seats back as it can.

The Evie chatbot has had a huge impact on social media over the last few years. She is probably the most popular artificial personality on YouTube. She has appeared in several videos by PewdiePie, the most subscribed YouTuber in the world. This includes a flirting video with over 12 million views! Evie has been filmed speaking many different languages. She chats with Squeezie in French, El Rubius and El Rincón De Giorgio in Spanish, GermanLetsPlay and ConCrafter in German, NDNG - Enes Batur in Turkish, Stuu Games in Polish and jacksepticeye, ComedyShortsGamer and KSIOlajidebtHD in English. And that is a very small selection. Evie shares her database with Cleverbot, which is an internet star in its own right. Cleverbot conversations have long been shared on Twitter, Facebook, websites, forums and bulletin boards. We are currently working to give Evie some more artificial companions, such as the male avatar Boibot.

All of these conversational technologies employ natural-language-recognition capabilities to discern what the user is saying, and other sophisticated intelligence tools to determine what he or she truly needs to know. These technologies are beginning to use machine learning to learn from interactions and improve the resulting recommendations and responses.
Chatfuel is one of the leading chatbot development platforms to develop chatbots for Facebook Messenger. One of the main reasons of Chatfuel’s popularity is easy to use interface. No knowledge of programming is required to create basic chatbot. People with non-technical background too can create bots using the platform and launch on their Facebook page.…
“Beware though, bots have the illusion of simplicity on the front end but there are many hurdles to overcome to create a great experience. So much work to be done. Analytics, flow optimization, keeping up with ever changing platforms that have no standard. For deeper integrations and real commerce like Assist powers, you have error checking, integrations to APIs, routing and escalation to live human support, understanding NLP, no back buttons, no home button, etc etc. We have to unlearn everything we learned the past 20 years to create an amazing experience in this new browser.” — Shane Mac, CEO of Assist
Dialogflow is a very robust platform for developing chatbots. One of the strongest reasons of using Dialogflow is its powerful Natural Language Understanding (NLU). You can build highly interactive chatbot as NLP of Dialogflow excels in intent classification and entity detection. It also offers integration with many chat platforms like Google Assistant, Facebook Messenger, Telegram,…
ELIZA's key method of operation (copied by chatbot designers ever since) involves the recognition of cue words or phrases in the input, and the output of corresponding pre-prepared or pre-programmed responses that can move the conversation forward in an apparently meaningful way (e.g. by responding to any input that contains the word 'MOTHER' with 'TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY'). Thus an illusion of understanding is generated, even though the processing involved has been merely superficial. ELIZA showed that such an illusion is surprisingly easy to generate, because human judges are so ready to give the benefit of the doubt when conversational responses are capable of being interpreted as "intelligent".
There are various search engines for bots, such as Chatbottle, Botlist and Thereisabotforthat, for example, helping developers to inform users about the launch of new talkbots. These sites also provide a ranking of bots by various parameters: the number of votes, user statistics, platforms, categories (travel, productivity, social interaction, e-commerce, entertainment, news, etc.). They feature more than three and a half thousand bots for Facebook Messenger, Slack, Skype and Kik.
Over the past year, Forrester clients have been brimming with questions about chatbots and their role in customer service. In fact, in that time, more than half of the client inquiries I have received have touched on chatbots, artificial intelligence, natural language understanding, machine learning, and conversational self-service. Many of those inquiries were of the […]
Tay, an AI chatbot that learns from previous interaction, caused major controversy due to it being targeted by internet trolls on Twitter. The bot was exploited, and after 16 hours began to send extremely offensive Tweets to users. This suggests that although the bot learnt effectively from experience, adequate protection was not put in place to prevent misuse.[56]